That's what's so scary about them, right? It's something we get to decide instead of looking out into the world and trying to discover some nonexistent fact about which path of life is best for you. They're like junctures in our life where we get to realize ourselves as one kind of agent as opposed to another. And when you commit to one path as opposed to another, you put your whole self behind it.Īnd when you do that, when you open yourself up to the possibility of making a commitment, you finally remake yourself right into or realize yourself as someone who has committed - to Bob, or to the career on the West Coast, or lumberjack-hood - and you make yourself into someone for whom it is now true that you have most reason to do that instead of the other thing. You have to open yourself up to the possibility of making a commitment. I call the small improvement test, and it doesn't follow that improving it a little bit makes it much better than the other one, then, you know, you're stuck in a hard choice. It doesn't make that improved job now better than the East Coast job. It's better than it was before, but it doesn't seal the deal. Say we're going to raise the salary of your West Coast job by a thousand dollars a year. One job is better than the other in some respects, but it doesn't seem like one of them is at least as good as the other. Suppose you've got the one career on the West Coast and the other career on the East Coast. On how to know you're facing a really hard choice, or her "small improvement test" Highlights from our conversation are below, edited for brevity and clarity. That's when the hand-wringing kicks in.Ĭhang can't tell you what choice to pick, but she can give you useful strategies for thinking through those choices. "One alternative is better than the other in some respects the other alternative is better than the other in other respects and neither seems at least as good as the other, overall," says Chang. What makes a decision hard, Chang notes, is when the two choices in front of you are on par. You get an operation that will cure some debilitating disease you have." That's an easy decision. "Some of your big decisions, while life altering, are perfectly easy. One of Chang's research areas is decision-making. "It's really important to distinguish big choices from hard choices," says Ruth Chang, a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Oxford. Do you take the new job? Break up with your partner? Move closer to your parents? Start a totally different career? “I was good at making sure the people working with me were there for the right reasons, that there was a core integrity to what they were doing,” he added.Being faced with a big decision can be overwhelming. “I had confidence in the talent around me,” Obama said. That’s why surrounding himself with intelligent people, including experts, was important. Calling himself “old fashioned,” and a person who believes in “enlightenment values like facts and reason and logic,” Obama said that if he knew he was considering every possible angle then he was “making the best decision that anybody in situation could make.”īut confidence in these decisions also meant “having the confidence to have people around you who were smarter than you, or disagreed with you, or have perspectives that were different than yours.” Obama noted that people in big jobs sometimes feel they need to have all the answers, but more often than not, they don’t. And determining the best option required getting as much information as possible from the smartest people. So Obama realized it was critical to be “comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to get a 100% solution…so that you don’t get paralyzed trying to think that you’re going to actually solve this perfectly.”įrom there, he knew he had to focus on the best option. commander in chief, the issues that most often ended up on his desk were “the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution.” Those that were easiest to solve would already have been figured out by someone else. Speaking at the 2019 Qualtrics X4 Experience Management Summit in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, the 44th president described how he grappled with such challenges.Īs U.S.
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